1) The mediawiki homepage puts ME off. This is mainly
because I'm more
interested in doing things with the data on wikipedia rather than the
software that runs Wikipedia. I think this is the problem we are
trying to solve - there are many different types of developers out
there and we need something generic to appeal to as many of them as
possible.
I want to add something a little more general to this point. I think we
can avoid appealing to _people_ in this page, and instead appeal to
_actions_. I wrote about it on the RFC [0], but I'll repeat myself
briefly here.
I don't think that throwing people into buckets (i.e., appealing to
types of developers) is a useful way to think about this. If you want to
*make MediaWiki better*, we send you to a more specific page about how
to develop, translate, code review, and document. If you want to *set up
or change a MediaWiki site*, we send you to a page with documentation on
configuration, performance tweaks, and extensions. If you want to *use
MediaWiki sites*, we send you to a page with editing help, information
about user permissions, how to use the interface, and so on. We could
split this up further, or differently. We could include the same link in
multiple pages (e.g., pages about extensions could go in many categories).
My point is, I think we could accomplish much the same, maybe more,
without lumping people together, when we actually mean to group actions.
[0]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/MediaWiki.org_Main…
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
http://marktraceur.info